Another US Quagmire? Lebanon Government Falls

Posted on 01/13/2011 by Juan

Ironically, while Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri was meeting with President Obama on Wednesday, his government fell. As one Arab commentator observed, he went into the meeting a prime minister and came back out a civilian.

It is a joke of course. Al-Hariri will be caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed, which could take some time.

The danger is that it won’t take much time, and that the new government could be from the “March 8″ coalition that includes Hizbullah. A Hizbullah-dominated government in Beirut is a different proposition from the recent government of national unity, in which Hizbullah’s power was watered down among 30 cabinet ministers. It is not impossible that such a development, i.e.Hizbullah dominance, could lead to US and Israeli action against the new government, whether a covert action or a military attack.

Al-Hariri, a Sunni Arab backed by Saudi Arabia, is the son of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005. An international tribunal is still trying to affix blame in that killing, and last summer the Shiite Hizbullah leader Hasan Nasrallah announced that the Tribunal was leaning toward fingering members of his party-militia as the perpetrators. I was in Beirut in August, when Nasrallah attempted to put the blame on the Israelis, but even he admitted that he could make only a circumstantial case, and aside from his die-hard followers it is unlikely that very many people accepted his suggestion.

Rafiq al-Hariri had stood up to Syrian control of Lebanese politics, and Hizbullah is closely allied with Syria. If his had been a unique case, then a whole range of possible assassins might have suggested themselves (at the time I thought that a radical Sunni al-Qaeda affiliate might have done it.) But then a whole string of Lebanese figures who spoke out against then Syrian troop presence in Lebanon were assassinated or attacked. In the end, it seemed obvious that some pro-Syrian cell was behind all this, whether in the Syrian secret police or in some pro-Syrian organization.

On March 8, 2005, Hizbullah and its allies demonstrated in favor of Syria. On March 14, 2005, there were big anti-Syrian demonstrations, mainly Christian and Sunni. The latter convinced the Syrians to leave. “March 8″ (led by Christian Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and including Hizbullah) and “March 14″ (led by al-Hariri’s Sunni Future Party) became political coalitions. In the elections of 2009, the March 14 group gained 71 seats in a parliament of 130, while the March 8 group gained 57, though the latter won the popular vote. In the end the two formed a government of national unity, which collapsed on Wednesday.

March 8 members of parliament are saying that they now have a majority in parliament (66), though it is unclear where the new 9 seats came from (or even whether the allegation is even true). Presumably it is being alleged that some deputies are defecting from March 14 to March 8. If the allegation is true, President Sulaiman may ask a March 8 leader to attempt to form a new government.

Lebanon is a fragile, divided country with Shiites, Sunni Arabs, Maronite Christians, and Eastern Orthodox Christians, along with Druze and other, smaller sectarian groups. Politics is mostly conducted on the basis of religious ethnicity. Thus, if the Tribunal does point to Hizbullah, it could well provoke Sunni-Shiite violence.

Since last summer Hizbullah has used its presence in the national unity government to press PM Saad al-Hariri to pledge to ignore the tribunal. Al-Hariri declined. Last week Saudi Arabia (patron of al-Hariri) and Syria (patron of Hizbullah) met to attempt to work out a compromise, but they failed.

Saad al-Hariri’s government may have been listening to the Obama administration in being so inflexible. If so, Washington may have hoisted itself by its own petard, since the last thing it wanted was a March 8 government in Beirut.

It is unclear if whatever new government emerges will be acceptable to key Lebanese factions, or to powerful regional neighbors. That is, Lebanon has entered a period of profound instability that could affect the fortunes of the entire Levant.

Share|

Posted in Lebanon | 8 Comments

Palin Borrows ‘Blood Libel’ from Israeli Far Right

Posted on 01/13/2011 by Juan

Sarah Palin in her response to the controversy over her violent political imagery and that of the US right wing in general in the wake of the Tucson massacre, provoked a new controversy when she said,

“Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”

The “blood libel” was the false and outrageous accusation launched against Jews in medieval and early modern Europe by Christians that they stole Christian babies and used their blood in secret rituals. This bizarre obsession of European Christians resulted in attacks on and pogroms against the poor Jews on many occasions.

So why would a leader of white Christian populists (the kind of people who in previous eras have often been prejudiced against Jews) deploy the language of ‘blood libel’ to make her and her movement seem as though it were a persecuted minority?

I believe that the phrase was taken over by Palin’s speech writers from right wing Israeli discourse. Historian Melani McAlister argued in her book Epic Encounters that the US white right wing began using the Israelis in the late 1970s as a kind of collective Rambo figure to make themselves feel better about their declining power in world affairs. With the loss of the Vietnam War, the oil price spike, the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the hostage crisis, the US went through what Jimmy Carter called a “malaise” and was threatened with loss of control over the Third World.

Israel also seemed besieged by Third World enemies, especially the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and so forth. Thus, a successful Israeli operation such as the rescue of hostages at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976 gave the American right wing heart. Israelis were promoted into the ranks of white people (“whiteness,” which began by implying a northern European Protestant ethnicity, can be gained or lost over time by ethnic groups in the United States). The Israelis’ victories over brown peoples were psychological palliatives for the raw feelings of declining American white populists. This surrogacy, Rambo function of Israel for the American right wing was reinforced by September 11 and by the reconfiguration of the Palestinians, among the more secular people in the Middle East, as wild-eyed Muslim fanatics (an image that rather erases the Christian Palestinians from the scene).

In the past ten years both the American right wing and the Israeli right wing have suffered the humiliations of victory. The invasion and occupation of Iraq produced US torture, atrocities, and local civil war, a refutation by reality of the Right’s hopes of restoring the tarnished reputation of war and empire. The Israeli right, which is anyway not a self-reflective set of political traditions, increasingly did not know its own strength. Its wars on little Lebanon and littler Gaza did not look to the world like a David and Goliath story a la the Six Dar War with Egypt and Jordan. Those wars looked like a world class military and a high-tech society beating up on small, less developed neighbors. The Israeli disregard for Arab civilian life, moreover, appalled all close observers who cared about human rights and the international law of war. At the same time, the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank brought increasing misery to stateless, helpless Palestinians.

The Goldstone Report for the United Nations was among the first major extended critiques of Israeli crimes against civilian Palestinians to gain international credibility. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party pushed back against it last November in New Orleans. The Jerusalem Post reported of Netanyahu that he denounced the ‘delegitimization’ of Israel by documents such as the Goldstone report on civilian casualties and called it “a modern day blood libel.”

Psychiatrist Alfred Adler argued that the central human neurosis is an inferiority complex deriving from feelings of inadequacies in childhood, and that some people deal with it by over-compensating and developing a superiority complex, leading them to denigrate and put down others on the basis of ethnicity, for instance. That is, some people deal with their feelings of inadequacy by becoming competent and confident and positive toward their neighbors. Others deal with them by becoming bullies. Netanyahu is a classic of the latter sort, as his rhetoric demonstrates. The Gaza War cannot be criticized because that would make Netanyahu face the inadequacies he has suppressed through his bullying demeanor. To protect himself from critique he must make himself an innocent victim, attacked by the irrational hatreds of others.

In this way, the Goldstone Report, headed by a prominent Jewish jurist, becomes equivalent to the medieval persecution of Jews by fanatical and bigoted Christians.

For the Israeli far right wing, a peace process with Palestinians and the prospect of living with them is itself a blood libel. The USG Open Source Center translated the following:

‘ Washington Talks ‘New Blood Libel’ Against Jews

In a commentary entitled “Who Needs the Palestinian People?” published 23 August on the “Aveterra” LiveJournal blog, Mikha’el Goldenberg writes: “In light of the upcoming talks at the White House and Arab ultimatums, I will venture to declare this meeting ‘the new blood libel’ of the US Administration and its accessories with the aim of destroying the Jewish people under the pretext of peace. The Arabs of Gaza need to be resettled (according to the old 1943 US plan, which the UK opposed) to the territory of Iraq. The Arabs of Judea and Samaria should follow them. The Arabs of Israel must swear loyalty to the State of Israel, or else they can leave to the four winds. Otherwise, their very existence here is a pretext for all wars. No Arab state on historic Jewish land, on the biblical land of the Jewish people. If the United States, Russia, and Europe do not recognize this, then as traitors of their ancestors, who prayed according to the Holy Scriptures, they are unworthy to live on the earth.” (Aveterra LiveJournal in Russian — “Israeli Agency for Political and Politological Information” blog of anonymous writer… )

In this anonymous pro-squatter screed, opposition to the ethnic cleansing of millions of innocent Palestinians is equivalent to pogroms against Jewry.

The misuse of the ‘blood libel’ defense reached a crescendo of absurdity in early 2010, when a rabbi accused of sexual indiscretions dismissed the charges as… you guessed it… ‘a blood libel.’

Palin took the long-standing American right wing populist use of the Israelis as a symbol of white biblical riposte to the siege of pagan brown peoples a step further on Wednesday. She actually identified her followers as themselves a sort of tribe of Israel, and thus open to the same kind of persecution that the children of Israel have long suffered from. This extreme identification with the themes of the Likud and Shas Parties in Israel is an extension of the long-standing tradition of Christian Zionism. Whether Palin’s diction goes beyond that movement to suggest a strain of British Israelism is unclear.

The parallels to the right wing in Israel are exact. Just as its leaders complain that restraints on Israeli freedom of action in killing civilians during wars, or pressure on Israel to accept peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians, are a ‘blood libel,’ so any criticism of Palin for deploying a rhetoric of violence and warfare in civilian politics is likewise a blood libel.

The bully, afflicted by an inferiority complex, sees all opposition as unfair persecution.

Share|

Posted in Israel/ Palestine, US Politics | 22 Comments

Random Shooting in Egypt or Sectarian Hatred?

Posted on 01/12/2011 by Juan

Was it sectarian hatred or a policeman’s random meltdown? The answer is not clear, though many press accounts are rushing to judgment. One thing that seems clear is that people who have firearms should be checked for mental stability!

A stray Egyptian policeman on a train in Upper Egypt opened fire at a party of Coptic Christians Tuesday, killing 1 and wounding 5.

According to the MENA news service,

‘ Minya Governor Ahmad Dia-al-Din asserted on Tuesday (11 January) that there are no sectarian motives behind the shooting spree … “He (the shooter) took the train and randomly opened fire…There are no indications of sectarian reasons,” he told Nile News. “He did not know any of passengers and he was not familiar to the passengers as well.” ‘

The Coptic Christians, in contrast, felt singled out, though it is true that it would not be easy to tell Copts from Muslims in Egypt. Some reports said he went by tattoos of crosses on their wrists in identifying them as Christians. This Arabic report says he went by the lack of a head covering on the girls. That there is more than one story about how he allegedly discerned his target raises questions about whether that is what he did at all.

There are a lot of Coptic Christians in Upper Egypt, and any random shooting event there would likely hit members of that community.

In the aftermath, a crowd of angry Copts gathered to demonstrate before the police station in the small town of Samalut, and were dispersed by tear gas.

The further killing took place as Egypt withdrew its ambassador from the Vatican to protest what Cairo sees as undue interference in its domestic affairs by Pope Benedict.

On January 7, the Coptic date for observing Christmas, many Egyptian Muslims had offered themselves as human shields outside churches, to forestall more bombings like the one on New Year’s Day.

President Hosni Mubarak has affirmed that any attack on Coptic Christians is an attack on all Egyptians.

Share|

Posted in Egypt | 3 Comments

Biden: US Could be in Afghanistan Past 2014; Bombing Shakes Capital

Posted on 01/12/2011 by Juan

Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday in Kabul that the US might keep troops in Afghanistan after 2014 if asked to do so by the Afghanistan government. He thus reversed his earlier pledge that the US would be out of that country by that date, “come hell or high water.” He has been under pressure to qualify his earlier comment (presumably directed at his Democratic Party base domestically) because the Afghan Taliban and other insurgents are expected to attempt simply to wait out the US if they have fair confidence that it is on the way out. On the other hand, consistent policy is more likely to succeed.

Also in Kabul on Tuesday, a suicide bomber on motorbike killed 4 and wounded 31 when he sidled up next to a minibus carrying Afghan National Directory of Security staffers and detonated his payload. The explosion, near the Parliament building, shook the capital. That he was able to target that NDS minibus suggests to me that it was an inside job, and that someone somewhere in the Afghanistan government let the radical know when and where to attack. Such penetration of the Afghan security forces by Taliban or other insurgents is in turn highly disturbing. This bombing was the third in the capital in the past month, a worrisome sign. But even more unnerving was the successful assassination of a high intelligence official.

The Afghanistan government is claiming that the US military operation in Qandahar and its environs has cost $100 mn..

Share|

Posted in Afghanistan | 6 Comments

Death Penalty for Blasphemy Rare in Muslim World

Posted on 01/12/2011 by Juan

Pakistani campaigners against the country’s blasphemy laws are pointing out that out of 54 Muslim-majority countries in the world, at most 5 permit capital punishment for blasphemy. They are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and possibly Afghanistan (the new Afghan constitution incorporates human rights norms that could affect statutes treating blasphemy as a capital crime).

Note that three of these countries with harsh penalties for blasphemy are close allies of the United States.

Blasphemy laws are of course objectionable on their face, though they also exist in Christendom. (For what it is worth, there is a wikipedia survey of such laws.) As recently as 1969 a man in Finland was fined for a blasphemous piece of artwork entitled “Pig Messiah.” Some provinces of Australia, still have such laws on their books, though the last prosecution was in Victoria in 1918. Brazil, Austria, Denmark, etc. have anti-blasphemy laws, though they have not been used any time recently and the penalties are fines and jail time. It is more common nowadays in Europe for individuals to be prosecuted on charges of hate speech toward a religious community. Ironically, Germany used its anti-blasphemy law, originally designed to protect Christianity, to convict a man of defaming Islam in 2006. Israel also has a law against blasphemy, and in India it is illegal maliciously to defame someone’s religion. Blasphemy laws in many Muslim countries resemble those in Christendom in involving fines and jail time.

Muslim-haters in the US have been attempting to argue that Muslims are essentially violent, pointing to the death sentence for blasphemy as evidence. As it turns out, such laws are relatively rare in the Muslim world, and mainly come out of the Wahhabi branch, not mainstream Sunnism. (Pakistan’s law was a martial law ordinance promulgated by a pro-Saudi general).

Moreover, Islamic law or shariah expects that the state, not individuals, should prosecute and punish criminal infractions. Muslim-haters try to give the impression that all Muslims are vigilantes. Vigilanteism is a component of radical groups, but is forbidden by mainstream Muslim authorities.

Share|

Posted in Afghanistan, Islam, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Rightwingers feeling Unfairly Blamed

Posted on 01/12/2011 by Juan

Twitter Message

(courtesy Stacey (twitter.com/flipflops).

Share|

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

24 Dead in Tunisia Clashes; US Ambassador Called In

Posted on 01/11/2011 by Juan

Some 24 persons have been killed in clashes between protesters and government security forces in Tunisia. The government has closed schools and universities “indefinitely” as a way of demobilizing youthful protesters.

The Arabic press is reporting that Tunisia has called the US ambassador on the mat, and has called back its own ambassador in Washington, to protest statements by US officials that were critical of the regime’s actions and called for adherence to human rights norms.

The troubles broke out this winter when two unemployed workers in turn committed protest suicides. The permit of one as a street vendor had been pulled, and he was unable to get other work, and the government office concerned refused to meet with him. Students struck in solidarity with the unemployed, as have most attorneys, and now the situation has spiraled out of control. The students mind not only the high unemployment but the restrictions on civil liberties imposed by the secular, Arab nationalist regime. The regime of Zain Bin Ali, like that of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, is a hybrid. It has a heritage in the Arab nationalism of the 1950s. But it has also been kept going by a cozy corporatism of army, business and cvilian politicians, and by an iron fist in a velvet glove, and has developed neo-liberal tendencies that benefit the rich and upper middle class but leave substantial numbers of farmers and urban workers out of the new prosperity.

Zain Bin Ali has responded by promising to put college graduates, who have been out of work for 2 years, into a new job, and to create 300,000 jobs over all. He labeled the protesters “terrorists.”

The question is whether Tunisia is a harbinger of things to come in other sclerotic nationalist regimes such as Egypt and Syria.

Note that since the Tunisian crisis has to do with labor unions, unemployment, class anxieties, and a student youth movement rather than with Islam; and since the Tunisian government is counted as a firm US ally, the American mass media is largely ignoring this story. Ordinarily if it bleeds, it leads; but not when it is about class instead of about race or religion, since the latter categories are the only ones useful to monopoly capital in keeping ordinary people divided and distracted.

Aljazera English has a video report:

The unemployed also commit suicide, at a rate 2 to 3 times greater than ordinary in the United States. In the US, workers are no longer organized by labor union (it is only about 12% that are). The unions were broken in the US, starting with Ronald Reagan. Thus, despite high unemployment, Americans now lack the organization to protest the way in which everyday workers have been badly treated while the bankers who caused the financial meltdown in 2008 have largely skated free, and, indeed been rewarded with hundreds of billions of dollars from the tax monies of the workers whose lives they destroyed.

Share|

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Naw, There’s been no Right Wing Extreme Rhetoric

Posted on 01/11/2011 by Juan

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and other far right-wing demagogues have been quick to defend themselves from the charge of fostering a climate of poisonous political hatred in the United States, in the aftermath of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Gifford and the killing of Federal Judge John Roll, along with the injuring or killing of 10 other victims.

Just so we are clear, Glenn Beck playfully spoke on his radio show of murdering Michael Moore with his own hands. Rush Limbaugh suggested that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi were worse than Middle Eastern terrorists and that maybe our Pentagon has the wrong people in its sights. Ann Coulter expressed the wish that Timothy McVeigh had bombed the New York Times building rather than the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. These are major media personalities with millions of followers, who have been made multi-millionaires by corporations precisely because they routinely authorize the intimidation of workers, ordinary people, and thinkers who challenge the political status quo. So let us survey their hate speech, which in a civilized country would make responsible businesses ashamed to employ them and a conscientious public ashamed to listen to them.

Glenn Beck on the radio contemplates murdering Michael Moore (wait for it past the Ron Paul prologue):

Transcript here:

BECK: “Hang on, let me just tell you what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out — is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus — band — Do, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, “Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore,” and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, “Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.” And you know, well, I’m not sure.”

Rush Limbaugh calls Senator Harry Reid and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi “terrorists” and suggests that the Pentagon is “fighting the wrong enemy in the Middle East” (apparently he thinks San Francisco and Las Vegas are somewhere over there):

Transcript:

Limbaugh: “It could well be, ladies and gentlemen, that we’re fighting the wrong enemy in the Middle East. Maybe the real terrorists that we face are on Capitol Hill. I mean, really, who’s doing as good a job to undermine what this country stands for as the terrorists? ‘Dingy’ Harry, Nancy Pelosi. I mean, look, if they call us ‘hostage takers’ and ‘gangsters,’ then why can’t we call them what they are? They are terrorists. They certainly seem suicidal. Look at what they’re doing. Look at what they did. They knew they were going to get shellacked in this election and they did it! They knew they were gonna lose. And they want to take us with them.”

Ann Coulter, in an interview in The New York Observer:

‘ Then she said: “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

I told her to be careful.

“You’re right, after 9/11 I shouldn’t say that,” she said, spotting a cab and grabbing it.’

Coulter added in an interview with Right Wing News

“RE: McVeigh quote. Of course I regret it. I should have added, “after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.”

Limbaugh responded to his critics, saying “Do not kid yourself. What this is all about is shutting down conservative media. That’s what this is all about. Shutting down any and all political opposition.”

Limbaugh is admitting that the only way his version of the Republican Party can succeed politically is to engage in hate speech and whip up dangerous emotions, and he considers any pressure to back off these ugly techniques of demagoguery to be a “shutting down” of conservatism. That is, were he to have to fight fair, he would inevitably lose out to Democratic voices of reason.

No wonder the Right is pushing back so hard for its right to put people in the cross-hairs.

Share|

Posted in US Politics | 21 Comments

« Older Entries